Kerry Washington Chats About Pressure to Be Perfect and Share Personal Life

Kerry Washington Chats About Pressure to Be Perfect and Share Personal Life

The Scandal star says she wants her audience to focus on Olivia Pope and not her.

Published November 7, 2014

Kerry Washington recently gave the crew at 106 & Park a visit and chatted about the public's obsession with the personal lives of celebrities and why she refuses to let outsiders into what goes on with her family. It turns out that part of her reason is for the sake of her Scandal character, Olivia Pope.

"I feel like, for me, what I do for a living is I become other people. It's important to me to keep my private life private. Then, you can really believe that I'm these other people. You're not worried about my life, you're worried about Olivia Pope's life, and Olivia Pope's life is much more interesting than Kerry Washington's life," she said before adding her self-serving reason for why she keeps her personal life under wraps.

"For me, in my work, I give 150 percent, I do not hold back at all, but I feel like something has to be mine. With my family, we feel like we gotta keep each other for each other, and the work belongs to everybody. But no judgment, other people do it other ways. You just gotta figure out what works for you," Washington said.

But the typically private star did use a recent cover shoot to peel away the celeb façade and show us her true self. For the November issue of Allure magazine, Washington posed sans makeup and talked about being a "recovering perfectionist," a title she's had to battle while living in the spotlight.

"It's really important to be yourself, to be comfortable in your skin… I think it's unfair to feel like you have to wake up and be perfect," she told Shad Mossand Keshia Chante. "You wake up and be the best version of yourself you can be."

The new mommy to daughter Isabelle also said she's being smart about how she loses the baby weight.

"I've always been a person who really approaches health in a proactive way. I work out, I eat right, so those are things I continued to do once my doctor said I could, but not to be crazy about it. I'm breastfeeding, so I can't starve myself. It's important for me to be a good mom and a good actor and be responsible to myself and my family," she said.